For the majority of Americans, Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer. It has become our national summer solstice, the bonfires and welcoming of the summer sun being replaced with picnics, barbecues, family get-togethers, and so on.
Some Americans, however, recall that Memorial Day is the day that has been set aside to remember the men and women who died in America’s wars. It is marked by the placing of flags on the graves of those who served and wreaths at the national cemeteries to honor the fallen.
I used to be one of the latter. I participated in the marches to cemeteries, listened to the speeches in honor of our American dead, held back tears at the playing of taps, and generally tried to contribute my feelings to the secular prayer of remembrance. As a veteran (and up until a few years ago, a member of the reserve forces), I felt it to be a particularly important act of solidarity with my brothers & sisters in arms who not only “answered their country’s call” but “gave the last full measure of devotion.” For me the truths that underlay the cliches were tangible. I always seemed to feel the lives that had been cut short by the sudden violence of war, lives that were every bit as full and complex as mine. These were people with whom I shared a bond, and that bond required my remembrance & honoring of their lives on this day.
Then I went to Iraq.
If anything, my time overseas has deepened the emotions that Memorial Day has always inspired in me. As I have always made plain, my experience of war was far, far less than that of many. I never pulled the trigger of my weapon while aiming at another person, nor do I believe that anyone ever had me specifically in his sights. I experienced the death and destruction of war from one degree of separation; the IED explosions, rifle fire, RPGs, rockets, and mortars were always just beyond my bubble. I cannot even say that I ever felt really consciously afraid while I was “there” (though my psychologist has helped me to understand that, unconsciously, I felt fear for almost an entire year). The proximity was enough, though, to change how I experience Memorial Day. The bond that I felt for so long has moved beyond the concept of “honoring the dead” to “grieving for those we lost.”
I’m going to indulge in generalization and say that I don’t believe any normal person goes off to war intending to die. He or she may fear, perhaps even anticipate, the worst, but I doubt that it is anything other than unusual for a soldier* to feel that his or her death is inevitable and inescapable. Our will to live is strong, and even being surrounded by death doesn’t necessarily manifest a death wish. Even the soldier’s fatalism–”If it’s your time, it’s your time”–implies that life is always the preferable option.
But war is and has always been about death. No matter how much it’s glamorized, no matter how much we paint it over with ideas like “duty” and honor,” war is about death. The death of others and the possibility of our own. And death in war is not clean. The human body was not built for absorbing steel-jacketed bullets, red-hot shrapnel, concussion waves, intense & immediate heat, and all the other means that people have devised to tear apart other human beings. As so many warriors have remarked over the centuries, there is no honor or glory in battlefield death. Those are terms the living use to deal with the horror of war.
This is why I’ve chosen to stay home on Memorial Day since 2006. I feel that solidarity with the dead even more for having been close to the dead. The dead have faces for me now, faces of the men & women with whom I served for twenty years. All the speeches and flags and parades and bugle calls cannot hide those faces from me. I feel grief far too deeply, and I feel it far too personally to share with a crowd of others.
Perhaps it’s alright in a larger sense to honor the fallen. I will certainly never presume to take away the sincere sentiments of those who remember the dead, even those whom we only know through a name on a brass grave plaque and a small American flag. For me, though, no speech, no flag, no parade, no playing of “Taps” can hide the horror that is war. No collective memorializing can, for me, mask the individual deaths of the men & women who never wanted to die. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. The grief from the loss of all these individual lives combines into the heat of a bonfire that overwhelms me, heat that holds me in thrall while threatening to consume me. I am left looking at the brutal, awful, distillation of, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “The Horror! The Horror!
I cannot participate in Memorial Day because the substance of its meaning is too much for me. When I think of the dead on this day (and as I write this I find myself thinking especially of four soldiers who died on a hot August night in 2005 about five klicks from where I stood), I find myself wishing that we as a nation could honor our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives, our sons and daughters by dedicating ourselves to the goal of never having another person sacrifice his or her life in war–any war.
In the meantime, perhaps Memorial Day should be about forgiveness.
* I’m using soldier in the generic to refer to any person in the military sent to war–soldier, sailor, marine, airman; it is not intended to slight the member of any service.
